Zoomable Charts in Seconds

Several people have
written about ways to “zoom” into your charts, one of whom is my brother, Ken Flerlage, and another is
my boss and colleague, Jeff Shaffer.Ken’s blog post talks about using
set actions to show a zoomed in area in another window when you hover.Jeff’s blog post talks about how to create a zoom feature
in the tooltip using bins and a duplicate chart.Both of these methods are really cool and I
suggest you read them both before proceeding.

In this blog post,
I am going to introduce a method of zooming into any chart that can literally
be done in seconds.It’s an incredibly
simple trick that I had never seen used before.When I asked around, I learned that several people knew about it, but
even more did not.And this is the
reason that I am sharing it with you now.

You may notice that
the vast majority of points in this jitter plot are between 50 and 65 years of
age.However, there are a couple of
outliers below 40 and nearing 75.Because of the outliers, the x axis is stretched and the vast majority
of points sit directly on top of each other.

I wanted to allow
the reader to further explore this chart.I started with two parameters for a min age and max age.When the user chose a min age of say 50 and a
max age of say 65, it essentially zoomed into the chart by filtering out the
points that were not in that range.However, it was a bit clunky in my opinion (it required the selection of
two parameters) and it was actually filtering out points, which I did not want
it to do.

I considered set
actions for some type of drill-down capabilities, tried mapping a transparent background
image to provide the map toolbar (which worked by the way), but I then had a “DUH”
moment.I right-clicked the chart and
viola, there was an option to “Show View Toolbar”.Sure enough, that added the toolbar to the
chart like with any map and I was able to navigate the jitter plot.Below is a GIF showing how simple this is.

And that’s all there
is to it!Right-click the chart, choose “Show
View Toolbar”, then use the toolbar to explore the chart just like you would do
with a map.So simple!Although you may not need it, I’ve created a sample workbook to go along
with it.

I hope you enjoyed
this quick blog post.As always, please
feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.